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khaos

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markm Mentor

markm

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12 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Yup. Felt like it was plodding, I wanted the songs to do more than they did.

I'm OK with plodding DM 🙃 I liked Bringer Drought. Are you down with the Thantifaxath album? It's going to be a '23 arty black avant darling. I listened to a couple of tracks on the way into work this morning. Not super feeling it tho. 

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JamesT Mentor

JamesT

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15 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

You know I'm just messin' wiff ya JT. You don't have to justify yourself or your musical choices to me or anyone else. I don't care what music you listen to brother, you can listen to all the nu-metal you like and we'll still be friends. As long as I don't have to listen to it we're gonna be cool. I was already 33 when the first Korn album came out in '94 which supposedly marks the beginning of the "nu-metal" era and that shit simply didn't appeal to my middle aged metalhead sensibilities as it seemed to be commercial drivel aimed more at teenaged school kids. But I can totally understand how someone just coming into the age of musical awareness as a pre-teen adolescent during the height of the nu-metal plague would have lower resistance and therefore be susceptible to infection.

I'm a fan of blues based hard rock because I grew up on blues based hard rock. That's all we had when I was growing up in the 70's, hard rock. Unless you were a pop music, R&B or disco fan or listened to soft-cock radio friendly rock, country or old people's music or avant-garde nonsense or something. (Or whatever the hell Doc was listening to in the 70's.) So I willl always retain a basic appreciation for the style, even if it's not my main musical focus anymore now in my old age. I turned away from "rock" for quite a few years in the 80's and 90's as I chased emerging markets of heaviness, but I've since come back around to hard rock and made my peace with it, found a place for it in my life. Strangely I haven't ever really come back around to traditional heavy metal though. The high-pitched vocals still render it fairly repulsive to me unless it's one of my old favorites from back in the day that gets grandfathered in for purely nostalgic reasons.

I do like a bit of late 90's early 00's hard rock, stoner rock, stoner metal or whatever you want to call it. I'm just real selective about it, so it has to have a certain hard edge to it and I prefer that it be super riffy. The Devil and the Almighty Blues fits in with my taste, stoner rock from Norway, although they are a bit more bluesy and "jam" oriented than most of the riffy "stoner rock" I typically listen to, it evokes memories of old Zeppelin, Traffic and Cream records from my youth. I don't actively seek out hard rock in the way I search high and low for new black and death metal albums, but still I do have my 30 or 40 go-to albums in that hard rockin' style, most of which I've just stumbled over by chance and added to the collection over the years. Some of it would be considered "stoner" and a lot of it crosses the line into what I think most people'd consider punk rock, but as far as I'm concerned it's really all just straight ahead pure hard rock. Being a Yankee from the Big Apple and not a Tar Heel like you I'm not concerned with it being "southern," although back in the day I was a huge fan of what we used to call southern rock, Hatchet, Blackfoot, Skynyrd and the like. And of course I'll always love ZZ Top. That southern 70's stuff still gets spins each year in the summertime.

 

Some of my go-to hard rock albums:

 

Supersuckers - The Evil Powers of Rock 'n' Roll, AZ 1999

 

Sasquatch - Sasquatch II, 2006. LA band, but I believe the main guy Keith Gibbs guitar/vox is originally from Detroit.

 

Mud City Manglers - Heart Full of Hate, Pittsburgh 2000

 

Zeke - Kicked In the Teeth, Seattle 1998

 

Peter Pan Speedrock - Buckle Up and Shove It! Eindhoven Netherlands 2015

 

The Clamps - Deadly Kick For a Fat Fucker, 2013 Bergamo Italy

 

Nashville Pussy - High as Hell, Atlanta GA 2000

 

Unida - Coping With the Urban Coyote, California Mojave desert 1999

 

Camarosmith - Camarosmith, Seattle 2003

 

COC - America's Volume Dealer, Raleigh N. Carolina 2000

 

The Atomic Bitchwax - II, New Jersey 2000

 

Social D - White Light, White Heat, White Trash, Fullerton CA 1996

 

You're never intruding Ari, I post these things with hopes of stimulating some conversation, so feel free to jump in anytime.

Even as a fan of some nu metal, I have to say I absolutely love that analogy to a plague and being susceptible to infection!  I completely understand why that style has a bad rap.  Nostalgia is a powerful thing, as we all know, though!

Oh man, lots of great stuff in the hard rock you mentioned!  I'm glad to see bands like Supersuckers, Nashville Pussy, Zeke, and Peter Pan Speedrock on the list, as all of those are in regular rotation in my listening time.  In fact, I was just blasting Zeke while I was at the gym the other day.  "Hellbender" (2018) is just ferocious.  The sound is just high-octane purity.  

Can't go wrong with ZZ Top!  "Eliminator" is a favorite album of mine in general, regardless of sub-genre.  

I'll be hopping back on a pretty major Motorhead kick here pretty soon.  By the way, how did everything turn out with your fridge?

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FatherAlabaster Grand Master

FatherAlabaster

Posted
Posted
16 minutes ago, markm said:

I'm OK with plodding DM 🙃 I liked Bringer Drought. Are you down with the Thantifaxath album? It's going to be a '23 arty black avant darling. I listened to a couple of tracks on the way into work this morning. Not super feeling it tho. 

I hadn't listened to it yet. Thanks for the reminder. I just put it on. Seems to get more interesting as it goes on, definitely worth coming back for a second listen, but I'm not sure how much of this I need in my diet right now.

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Thatguy Veteran

Thatguy

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1 hour ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Yeah baby indeed. I liked the synth parts you didn't on Crystalline Exhaustion but it's thrilling to hear them get back to this kind of stuff.

I had almost given up on them, but I am so glad I didn't. Their style of intricate guitar riffing is like no one else. I wish Marston had used actual bass in the second half as well, but I can appreciate the synth bass parts better when the whole thing is not just a wash of synth.

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MacabreEternal Veteran

MacabreEternal

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Assumption - Hadean Times (2022)

 

12 hours ago, FatherAlabaster said:

I hadn't listened to it yet. Thanks for the reminder. I just put it on. Seems to get more interesting as it goes on, definitely worth coming back for a second listen, but I'm not sure how much of this I need in my diet right now.

After 5 or 6 listens to the new Thantifaxath I gave up trying to get under the skin of it.  I think it sets its stall out too early and so I have no sense of build, just forcibly immersed into its mesmerising depths from the off.  Even my best Oranssi Pazuzu, BAN and Jute Gyte listening hats cannot fathom this one.

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FatherAlabaster Grand Master

FatherAlabaster

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16 minutes ago, MacabreEternal said:

After 5 or 6 listens to the new Thantifaxath I gave up trying to get under the skin of it.  I think it sets its stall out too early and so I have no sense of build, just forcibly immersed into its mesmerising depths from the off.  Even my best Oranssi Pazuzu, BAN and Jute Gyte listening hats cannot fathom this one.

Yeah, I hear that. My negative hot take on first listen: Exactly the sum of its parts. Some great ideas that get overused and needlessly complicated in a way that sounds forced/cerebral and misses out on emotional depth. I really like a lot of the riffs, but the rhythmic hiccups and stutters don't convince me. Less of that would have been more. There's something about it that's weirdly all surface-level, polished, not disorienting or surprising in a meaningful way. Krallice and Ad Nauseam feel authentic when they do this kind of thing; this album just feels like a "hey look, we do it too".

Having said that, I like this band and I want to enjoy their stuff. Might have been listening in the wrong mood. Maybe I'll warm up to it.

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Nasty_Cabbage Experienced

Nasty_Cabbage

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29 minutes ago, FatherAlabaster said:

Spectral Voice - Sparagmos promo track ("Red Feasts Condensed Into One")  ...fun stuff, this is plodding I can get behind

https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/sparagmos

Album's pretty good. Kind of cracks me up that metal bands have finally found the term 'sparagmos' which in the strictest of definitions is a sort of myth infused flaying ritual conjoined with the climax of any number of bacchanalic festivals in Rome (and sharing a number of characteristics with earlier Greek festivals). I found out about the word through an introduction to one of Iris Murdoch's novels, and it's figurative use is surprisingly flexible. Took the metal heads long enough to find it though.

 

NP: Morbid Sacrifice - Ceremonial Blood Worship

Ceremonial Blood Worship | MORBID SACRIFICE | 𝔊𝔬𝔡𝔷 𝔒𝔳 𝔚𝔞𝔯 𝔓𝔯𝔬𝔡𝔲𝔠𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔰 (bandcamp.com)

a2210755179_10.jpg

Seems like the black metal hit the ground running for me this morning. Been on a steady diet of it already and the new finds keep coming.

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FatherAlabaster Grand Master

FatherAlabaster

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1 hour ago, Nasty_Cabbage said:

Album's pretty good. Kind of cracks me up that metal bands have finally found the term 'sparagmos' which in the strictest of definitions is a sort of myth infused flaying ritual conjoined with the climax of any number of bacchanalic festivals in Rome (and sharing a number of characteristics with earlier Greek festivals). I found out about the word through an introduction to one of Iris Murdoch's novels, and it's figurative use is surprisingly flexible. Took the metal heads long enough to find it though.

Have you read Roberto Calasso's "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony"? Really engaging de- and re-construction of Greek myth and poetry. He mentions the story of the killing, dismemberment, and consumption of Zagreus, who became identified with Dionysus and got retconned into being part of his origin story. Lots of interesting connections to other ideas.

I'm not too surprised the word hasn't popped up in metal music before though, it sounds more like a dinner dish than something tough and cool like flaying and dismemberment.

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